


Kindling

by abrae



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Meetings, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-13
Packaged: 2018-03-30 07:43:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3928636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abrae/pseuds/abrae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John meets Mary, and he likes what he sees.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kindling

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little quick-fic that plays with how John met Mary, and what it was that he fell in love with.

The first year of John’s tenure at the clinic near his flat is nothing so much as a comedy of errors, performed by a mind-bogglingly endless supply of incompetents. The worst of them, lasting but a few hours, is dismissed on the other end of a miscalculated dosage that comes perilously close to hospitalization and a lawsuit; the best, a three-weeker who falls on the sword of her own lamentable skill in locating veins to draw blood, leaves a painful trail of black and blue in her wake. 

Thus it is that John holds out little hope for the petite new nurse who introduces herself to him one early April morning. Yes, Mary is pretty - so was number four, if he recalls - the one with the habit of sauntering into the clinic a good two hours after she’d left for lunch. And yes, there’s a certain indefinable sharpness lurking in her shining eyes that John doesn’t even realize he’s begun to seek out  until it’s far too late to stop.

A month later, John remains cautiously optimistic; so much so that he invites Mary one night to the pub down the road for a bit of dinner. It’s pouring down rain as they leave the clinic, so they huddle under John’s dilapidated umbrella and run down the darkened street. For the first time in an age, John’s heart beats a little harder, a little faster, as they tumble into the pub together, laughing and shaking the water from their jackets. John is grateful for the almost stifling warmth of the pub - it gives him a reason for reddened cheeks that has nothing to do with the softness of Mary’s smile and the way the raindrops sparkle in her hair.

They trade simple stories over pasties and prosciutto. John skims his experiences for the most entertaining anecdotes of military life he can recall, and Mary answers with her own stories of A&E bedlam; and if Mary seems oblivious to the two year void since Afghanistan that John fails to mention, neither does he observe that Mary’s own recollections elide time altogether. They both exist in the moment, and for now it’s enough.

He doesn’t fall in love that night, though he imagines what a kiss might have been like in the darkness of his too-quiet flat. But it begins - a kindling respect, tinged blonde by her hair and blue by her eyes, that gives off a comfortable warmth as her small competencies accumulate in his mind. Mary’s steady hands and quick reflexes, her paradoxically razor-edged compassion all linger when she’s left for the day, a living presence that slowly insinuates itself into the dark spaces haunted by shadows of the past.

And one night - stormy like the first, and like the first punctuated by a rosy flush both John and Mary share - it takes only a friendly game of darts, turned ruthless by Mary’s unerring aim, to turn the warm embers of affection into a bright blaze he neither can nor wants to deny. 


End file.
